River of Forgotten Bodies
“You know, I really could’ve been a physicist.” Dan says this as if, despite being in his early thirties, he’s an old man over whom time and the world have long-since passed. He says the only reason he’s not is he can’t take exams for higher math. He took calc and trig courses in college--even audited a graduate class in real analysis once. “Understood every word, letter, number, and symbol. But it all just dropped out of my head as soon as someone would test me on it.”
Still, he says, he gets the principles on a metaphorical level. “And metaphor,” he insists, “is the only way you really understand anything. Take the expanding universe,” he says to no one in particular. “You can learn all the formulas and functions you want, but at the end of the day, what’s the best way to understand how the universe is expanding?”
He pauses, as if giving a lecture to a rapt audience, before he pulls a rubber band from his pocket. “Imagine this is the universe.” He pinches it at two points and pulls until it snaps. Then he lays it on the table. “It’s hard to picture this in 3D, so we’re gonna do it in 2D.” He stares at the rubber band a moment. “One dimension, I guess.”
He places crumbs from the bar on the rubber band, and pulls on either end, nodding toward the largest crumb: “The Milky Way. If you look out from here, everything’s moving away from you in either direction. You’re the center of the universe. But if you move over here to the Eye of Sauron--that’s a real galaxy by the way--you’d say, ‘No, everything’s moving away from me here in the Eye of Sauron.’ But it's all an illusion. You'll see yourself as the center no matter what because it’s all expanding in every conceivable direction. Which in this metaphor, there’s only two.”
*
Dan’s started exploring these old tunnels. Erie’s full of them--passageways from the Underground Railroad. In the mid-1900s, homeless communities started taking shelter inside, but then dead bodies started showing up. Eventually, you couldn’t go five feet in without being smothered by the stench.
Efforts to clear out the bodies went on for years until the city abandoned them and sealed the entrances. Dan’s found three, as well as ways to get into the ones under Perry Square and by East and 6th. 2nd and Liberty is another matter. The others were boarded up, but here they laid bricks.
Tonight, he’s got a sledgehammer, hardhat, and headlamp he bought online. And beer, of course. When he knocks in a hole, a cloud of decrepit air billows back with dust and debris. Dan vomits into the mouth of the tunnel. Then he wipes his face, pulls his shirt over his nose, and knocks in more bricks.
Stepping through, he grows dizzy and braces himself against the entrance, squinting into the black. He stumbles forward deliriously toward the beam of his headlamp like a mosquito buzzing toward a streetlight.
When the air grows thick and hot with decomposition, he stops. A wall of rotting something looms as the near constant sounds of cracking and crushing reverberate in terrible ambience. The wall seems to shudder and settle every now and then, as if pushed from behind like meat stuck in a grinder.
A forgotten memory overwhelms his senses. A woman named Darlene wanders into the gas station, looking for a little girl. He hasn't seen the girl, but suggests she might be in the restroom. He turns to take care of some customers, and the next thing he knows, Darlene comes staggering out in her full naked glory. Before he can speak, a rush of customers shoves through the doors and around the naked woman like a sea of bodies.
Darlene reaches up and yells, "Dan! What's going on?" Another woman comes running and throws a jacket over her, pulling Darlene out the door. All the while, she keeps yelling after him. As she disappears into it, the faces in this fluid crowd melt into the wall of decay before him.
*
The next day, he’s all but forgotten the decaying climax of his spelunking and is raving about “the really crazy stuff, like wormholes, where you take two points in different parts of spacetime, and you pull them together, and you generate some kind of anti-gravity to open them up, and you get a portal across the universe. That’s what’s happening with those molecule-smashing machines at CERN and Fermilabs. They make these mini black holes that do all this crazy gravity stuff and punch through to other parts of spacetime.”
Then, quickly changing subjects, he tells the bartender about the Erie tunnels. “That’s the way out, I think. The Underground Railroad. Salvation subterra.”
Sarah nods vacantly. “Wow, that’s crazy, Daniel. I’ll be on the lookout. For the wormholes. And the Erie tunnels, right?” She points with two fingers at her eyes, then at his, and then with one finger at the floor.
Dan looks hard at her, trying to read her tone. “It’s Sheridan, actually.” He takes a drink. “I’m going back tonight."
“Like you said: maybe that’s the way out, right?”
He nods and lets out a long, drunken breath as he lays his head sideways over folded arms.
*
The city has a way of making you forget things. Dead things. Lost things. The fact that you can't leave. That there's nothing for you here. That one day the lake will rise, the gorge will overflow, and flash, bam, Alakazam, chunks of blood-red hail will fall from the orange-colored sky.
Either that or we'll all die of old age and melancholy.
These are Sheridan's thoughts as he approaches the tunnel at East and 6th. He takes the beer from his backseat, along with his hardhat and headlamp. Then he steps over the discarded boards and into the labyrinth.
He's never gone far beyond the entrance of any of these tunnels, but he's hoping for a way to the other side of where he came in at 2nd Street. Every now and then, a path terminates at a staircase leading up to … a church? An old restaurant? Who knows? They’re all sealed up now.
Rot creeps into his nostrils, and he feels like the last ant alive in a fumigated colony. All he can do to calm himself is to imagine more ants, reminding him of an article about how swarms of the insects can flow like a liquid.
He cracks another beer. The air grows thick and hot, like the pressure of an impending storm in the liquid heat of an August night. He heads into the terrible swelter until he finds himself at the precipice of a pit.
Another forgotten memory hijacks his senses. Shades Beach, the day after a massive storm. The stench is overwhelming as he approaches the shoreline, bringing into view a grotesque carpet of dead fish. A tide of gulls sweeps over them, gnashing and tearing at the reeking death.
He rubs his burning eyes and sits, dangling his legs over the pit. Flowing up from the other side, a slow river of corpses presses into the massive tunnel, bodies crushing from the force of one another against the walls and ceiling. Sheridan's gaze follows it into the impenetrably black pit.
He sits a long while, finishing his six-pack, numb to the terror before him. Then he finds himself dragging his passed-out-drunk friend out of the woods by his old elementary school while his other two friends laugh and throw pinecones at the inert, melting body in his arms. Unable to either drag him any further or convince one of them to take over, he drops the body, calls an ambulance, and the three of them flee the scene.
After that day, he found out his friend had alcohol poisoning. Sheridan had saved his life. A year later, that same friend's car wound up underneath a semi. He died on impact.
Sheridan drops his empty beer cans one at a time into the void, watching their strange arc until they disappear. He dons his backpack, plants his hands behind him, and without hesitation, shoves off.
His descent slows as he’s pulled toward the bodies. He finds some footing and begins clambering over the corpses until a limp appendage somehow ends up wrapped around his feet, taking them from under him. Soon, more bodies press into him, drawing him into the undertow of this slow-moving, upward-flowing river of corpses. He claws for a handhold, digging into dead, rotten meat that pulls off the bone and oozes from between his fingers.
Finally, he lets them take him, like an element swallowed into a larger compound. He falls into a drunken sleep as the bodies subsume, suffocate, and carry him home.
